Greetings esteemed Administrators,
recently the faction Varangian Guard was dissolved by an illegal multi while the original owner of the faction was in hospital in real life.
The illegal multi got a 21 day ban. Now my question would be, should such occur in future, would a similar incident be treated the exact same way? If so, I would consider this a valid tactic to have other players create illegal one multi (21 ban is nothing) and harm other groups and/or players through sunning/faction dissolution. Of course, proof of "intent" or "planning" will not be possible as this would be setup out of game.
I would request a statement/comment for such scenario.
Thank you kindly,
Jake Azzameen

Edit: Update question, I remove "kill other player" because the death of Thies Windu at the hands of Beauba Fettt/Corvis Orion's illegal A/E multi already set precedent for an assassination scenario. As such I am only interested in the consequences for factions.

This sounds more like a passive-aggressive complaint rather than a genuine question. Regarding proof of intent, this isn't a court of law. Circumstantial evidence is easy to come by, and frequently sufficient. Multis are not necessarily handled identically to other multis, depending on the circumstantial evidence. If you would consider violation of the game rules a valid tactic on any level at all, I doubt very much that any such situation you set into motion would be treated with any leniency.

Well, that is actually the point - "circumstance" would be nonexistant in such a scenario, merely a lone player targeting seemingly random faction/player through an illegal multi.

As such, I am indeed interested in the question per se and not a complaint (I am neither in-game nor out-of-game emotionally or otherwise attached to Varangian Guard).

[[
" If you would consider violation of the game rules a valid tactic on any level at all, I doubt very much that any such situation you set into motion would be treated with any leniency." -> If I would like to complain, I would have done so when Thies was killed by Beauba Fettts illegal A/E alt. I did not do that back then, and I have no intent to complain now about it, which hopefully underlines the genuity of my interest in a official admin response to my question.

Edit: My motivation is of course that the answer to this knowledge helps me to determine how strict I must enforce security IC, because the admins do not care if my group falls victim to metagaming which people hostile to the GA are not planning to use, but have actually already used in the past and are still playing.
]]

If a player abused the rules by creating an illegal multi and those actions create a set of consequences that cause factions or characters to be lost/harmed then regardless if there is intent the rules are not helping to protect players that obey the rules from those that don't. It seems that the ban hammer is pretty fragile if used in such a way. I would think that the ban hammer is there to stop people breaking them, or punish them but also to protect those that actually don’t cheat.

While I can't speak for Jake I can speak of myself. If a player as been proven to be playing against the rules during a time in which one of his/her characters, or illegal multi caused IC harm. Then regardless of the nature of the IC action, the issue at hand is weather it was legal in the first place which clearly it was not otherwise they would not have been banned. Nothing Circumstantial about that unless admin in this case are banning people on Circumstantial evidence!

Jake is making a very valid point in the form of a question. No player can have two accounts and players sharing a net line MUST register multi. But now it seems abuse can be made and that might lead to a ban, but the ban planned or not planned, can have greater IC payoff resulting in damage to characters, factions and dare i say it to the game... and still not be reverted!

so jake Question stands.... Is this allowed? will it be in all cases like this?
personally I think its no to both in which case why is it BEING allowed.

It seems then that we can generate a whole collection of meta-character tactics or general gameplan.... based off multi player misuse, abuse and yet still be against the rules. This as nothing to do with court of law this is having a bit of common sense and not give the incentive of dishonest players to do the wrong thing!

Yet clearly we have a case here. Player going against the rules harming a faction, potentially also characters, been banned and yet Admin believe that it is somehow rational to have the actions of said character during a time of rule breaking to still stick. Not smart.

Not sure I quite understand what Flar was trying to say because its long and its seemed to me he was repeating himself a lot, but regardless I think when multi is involved in something such as destroying the faction, the assets should be returned to the faction together with the ban and loss of assets of the multi. Otherwise as it was pointed out it can be used as a tactical move, just get yourself banned for 21 days while you cripple someone's faction. Which I know is hard to prove, but I am always for punishing cheaters as harshly as possible. Mira was long time player, she knew the rules, the decided to break them for her own gain.

But where does it stop? I had an illegal multi sun an bulk back in the days when freights got destroyed, should I have gotten the bulk back (I didn't, even though it was me who reported the suspicions about the char being an illegal multi)?

What about if an illegal multi pulls a scam, does the scam have to be undone then?

What about if an illegal multi props up the member count of a faction, do we need to retrospectively dissolve the faction and therefore undo all trades and salaries etc. that were paid from the faction after that date?

Exactly this is why I am asking. The enemies of the GA have demonstrated in the past that they are willing to use such schemes to reach their goals. I want to know how far they can go and what I must can say - hey the admins finally do something to protect gameplay.

Of course, I do also agree with what Lilith said and Helen supported. Using illegal tricks to ruin the gameplay of honest player just isn't the way to go...

The situation specific to this faction is currently being looked into; the inventory that belonged to the faction should be returned to the faction owner once Zhao finishes scraping it all off the market.